Can You Put Book Titles In Quotes

Even the most experienced writers have a problem remembering the proper punctuation for certain types of titles.

Can you put book titles in quotes. Quotation marks in titles. Books are italicized or underlined and articles are put in quotation marks. Why are we confused.

In general you should italicize the titles of long works like books movies or record albums. Like with most aspects of english there are some exceptions to the rule. For example it s correct to write the new york times.

But it never uses quotes far as i can see it s either italics or plain roman. Eat pray love harry potter and the deathly hollows and bossypants have i ever mentioned how much i love tina fey. These options aren t interchangeable.

Except when it doesn t. The rules for quotation marks around titles vary depending on which style guide you follow. One exception is when you have a book that is a collection of various novel titles like lord of the rings.

Headings of full works novel movies plays textbooks and epic poems should be italicized headings of books that form a larger body of work can be written in quotation marks in the case where the name of the book series is italicized headings of short works articles poems short stories and chapter titles should be in quotation marks. But amazon puts those same works in italics. Set the title off from the rest of the writing with italic or underlining.

Additionally when the word the is part of a title you do not italicize it. That s about as far as many people can remember. If a novel a long poem or a play is collected in an anthology we italicize any reference to the title if the work was originally published as a separate entity.